Also remember that a large part of Europe is suffering under extreem heat for a 2nd week this year. Temperatures of +40C. Coding with those room temperatures is like slowly pulling your nails out. That's if you're are not swimming somewhere to cool off.

Roxxor wrote:Why you make a serversetting which fits only for people who dont have lives outside of DAOC?

This just doesn't make sense. You won't make RR10 in a week here, I admit, but the game can still progress with small amounts of time. You just need to manage your expectations. As it turns out, with a life outside of DAOC I still find time to play.

If people were RR10 in a weeks time, where is the draw to keep playing?

I dont think someone wants to be rr10+ in a week or so. I tried phoenix two month and stopped because it was ridiculous that it was possible to have 1mio+ rps/week. I stopped because thats not my type of gameplay but i liked much of threir qol changes that removed alot of the painful timesink. As others already mentioned, small changes like personal inventory bindstones, campfires, some porter npc's, the crafting system (ingame macros). I think such small things would bring the server already a lot of new players. Also for example, you have no need anymore to ban players for using macro keyboards to level up their professions because its easy and fast. So it also makes your life easier because you dont have to check if someone is using third party tools for crafting. 1.65 is fine but why not with some qol's?? Dont get me wrong, i dont like to transform uthgard into phoenix. But this guys did a great job when it comes to this kind of qol. On the other hand i have my char, am well equipped and for me some of the mentioned changes would not really bring anything. But for new players it could be really helpful.

Regards

Abydos wrote:

Roxxor wrote:Why you make a serversetting which fits only for people who dont have lives outside of DAOC?

This just doesn't make sense. You won't make RR10 in a week here, I admit, but the game can still progress with small amounts of time. You just need to manage your expectations. As it turns out, with a life outside of DAOC I still find time to play.

If people were RR10 in a weeks time, where is the draw to keep playing?

what are you talking about? which char progression do you mean when the TOP rp earners have 30k rp/week?
others do then what 10k/week? thats rr4 in 20weeks. who would log in for this?
so the top5 will need 200weeks, or ca4 years atm to get to rr10.
average players will need 600weeks or more than 10years

Clearly special circumstances are in play right now pweet - the point was to illustrate that the same refrain of "we have lives now" simply is not constructive.

Yes, we all have lives. So what is the solution to logging in and having fun and where is the line drawn?

This game is incredibly old. The title of the thread even misses the mark in that there aren't going to be 2500-4500 players simply because the game's worldwide population doesn't support that for any meaningful duration.

Well you could adjust rp gain so ppl who still like to play on uthgard at least get rewarded for it.
I agree on the title and the general mood on this thread is not constructive, but things can still be done for players that are still active to make it more fun for them.

Yep, we're quite keen to make sure there are ample incentives to play. I've long been an advocate for such bonuses having been 'stuck' in unfavorable timezones here on Uth for years (like, peak population ~1200 EU but NA was ~150 -> 16 in RVR). The RVR tasks will give some such incentives that aren't just some raw 10x multiplier. We do move a bit slow and know tahat, but I can say that we...are ... making progress.

Roxxor wrote:

Abydos wrote:
Did you ever consider that we have other things to do, and while we want Uth to work and all that, that we might have lives outside of DAOC?

Hello, i think he knows that. But did you know it too?
Why you make a serversetting which fits only for people who dont have lives outside of DAOC?
We want to Uthgard work too. You better not forget this!
But with your servervision and treatment to your loyal players you break your players and your server.
Not you in personal Abydos, i mean you the staff.
And we are not your enemys.

But sad thing is, even now, you lock for progress, right?
No Porter, No more lesser timesink. No Porterstones... Every QoL we have on Uthgard was needed to beg the staff for giving us.
Hell, even the dot on map was a fight to get. Why is this needed? Just to pray to a bad patch-point?
Learn from history or repeat it.
Noone want pure patchpointserver, who ever played one.

Actually I don't like the map indicator. At all. Nor do I like the porters and bindstones. I like that losing in DAOC is painful, it changes the way I play. I also like that knowing the environment is an asset to get around in the different maps, which is not the case anymore with a map indicator. Just saying that to stress that there is no obvious choice to satisfy all players even for those changes that you describe as easy to decide.

But that's just me and a few others, I know. So if I had to choose between Uthgard with those changes I dislike, and Phoenix, I would definitely choose the altered Uthgard without hesitation. In that case, however, I would really hope that those changes - that I see as sacrifices - would be the key to restoring the population.

pweet wrote:

Abydos wrote:

Roxxor wrote:Why you make a serversetting which fits only for people who dont have lives outside of DAOC?

This just doesn't make sense. You won't make RR10 in a week here, I admit, but the game can still progress with small amounts of time. You just need to manage your expectations. As it turns out, with a life outside of DAOC I still find time to play.

If people were RR10 in a weeks time, where is the draw to keep playing?

what are you talking about? which char progression do you mean when the TOP rp earners have 30k rp/week?
others do then what 10k/week? thats rr4 in 20weeks. who would log in for this?
so the top5 will need 200weeks, or ca4 years atm to get to rr10.
average players will need 600weeks or more than 10years

Who said RR10 or even RR7 was something everyone could reach eventually? Do we really want a server where everyone will reach the "legendary" standard? Uthgard 1 was rebooted partly because many had already reached the limits and had no incentive for playing anymore, the RVR situation was set. On a popular game with big servers, those players would just stop playing and be replaced by new comers. On Uthgard, there are not many new comers.

20 weeks is nothing for a MMO. Hell, even one year is nothing for a game like DAOC: I want to be playing it even in years, and not just to reroll. It took me two years of very active playing to reach 3L8 solo on my first character, 4L1 on my second one (a bard, so admittedly a bit longer in solo), and get a third character to level 50. I'm perfectly fine with that. I could see myself still playing on Uthgard years later. Slow progression, but enough for me, and that's better than a quickly capped progression as on Phoenix. The only reason I don't play anymore is the low population; but I would be so happy to keep roaming around for just 5kRP a week. I may be a bit extreme, but I never understood why people would expect to have tens of thousands of RPs each week. PVP is supposed to be fun with sometimes a reward with a new skill, not another way of farming. Or should it be just farming?

Kabouik wrote:Who said RR10 or even RR7 was something everyone could reach eventually? Do we really want a server where everyone will reach the "legendary" standard? Uthgard 1 was rebooted partly because many had already reached the limits and had no incentive for playing anymore, the RVR situation was set. On a popular game with big servers, those players would just stop playing and be replaced by new comers. On Uthgard, there are not many new comers.

That players automatically stop or reroll is also not correct. I think I was 12L3 on Uth1, close to 12L4, and Flump 12L2 and no points after 12L0. Ofc it was a downer not to get anything beyond RR12, but I kept playing just for the fun. And I never asked for a wipe

I don't think RP should be a function of population, at least not to the extent you suggest. Fighting when the population was dense didn't mean that winning was easier, the probability to lose fights increases at the same pace with an average win/loss ratio being the same depending on player's skill. Sure, fights are more frequent so you get more wins and thus more RPs, but giving significantly more RPs to people just because they run on an empty server falls short. It just heals a symptom, while the real challenge is to bring people back to at least a minimal population threshold that wouldn't require such short term tricks.

I agree that there is probably a sweet spot, and the incentive could be higher with better rewards. You are right that we should let the current players progress and reach higher realm ranks despite the low density, but I don't see why they should be able to reach the highest realm ranks like you said. What if the population virtually goes down to 2 active players, should they still be able to reach RR10 killing each other? There is a limit to the idea of RP amounts being a function of server population; with an average of 50 players at peak hours, I think we already overreached that limit.

The vast majority of players never reached the highest ranks even on old official servers, and that never was an issue. I'm sure the vast majority of L50 characters didn't even reach RR4 or 5. The theoretical maximum is really something that only few can aim, and that is true in almost all other MMOs, even modern ones with high populations.

The question with people who reached the cap (or very high RR in general) is not only whether they will keep playing when their characters cannot progress anymore, some will do and some will stop, but also will new challengers be motivated enough to enter the battle when opponents have all gotten too strong and when the competition is already killed. I heard many people in game or here on the forum saying that it was too hard to get into the RVR, even when the population was high, but it is even more critical now that the opponents are rare. I don't agree with these people and whether or not I'll be destroyed in RVR by higher RR does not impact my motivation to get there, but I can understand their decreasing motivation. I doubt that facilitating [significantly] the progression of the few players currently playing would benefit in any way to the future of the server. But sure, rewarding them a little bit more sounds reasonable as long as it is not excessive.

Shining wrote: the crafting system (ingame macros). I think such small things would bring the server already a lot of new players. Also for example, you have no need anymore to ban players for using macro keyboards to level up their professions because its easy and fast. So it also makes your life easier because you dont have to check if someone is using third party tools for crafting.
Regards

GM's/Devs giving people ingame macros to level up their crafters sounds just as terrible as them giving all the classes that can auto train their AT points for free totally bypassing all the hard work it takes to get those skills/points...

wait a minute....they did give everyone their free auto train points totally bypassing all the hard work it took people in the past to get those points in the first place! Oh My God....Give everyone free in game macro's plz, I still have a few crafting professions I haven't done the hard way. I'd like to get in on that before you give it to everyone for free.

Also, remove up crafting.

I think Abydos said before that auto train was a stupid mechanic in the first place and that's why they removed it....
There's a lot of stupid mechanics in this game, they should be changed also.

Also someone said something about account vaults...I like it...but they'd have to make the vaults a lot bigger...
That's why I think it would just be easier for the Dev's to make it so bags could be picked up from the ground by other characters (Bag-Drop-Transfer)

I found someone to finally transfer during peek play time, this is how it went.
Logged in and saw a cleric at the forge. I said 'could you help me with an item transfer real fast bud?'
No response...3 minutes later he camped out.
So i /who camelot to see if anyones close by, a few low levels are in camelot hills i message 3 of them with no response (AFK?) the 4th one (a low level necro) 20 minutes later messaged me back and said yes.
I paid the necro 25gold and 175 emerald seals and hope he will continue playing.

What I would have prefered to do was a bag-drop transfer in an empty building and picked the bags up with my salvager instead of going out of my way to log in during peek times which is not convienent for a NA person and trying to find someone that speaks english and isn't AFK for over 30 minutes...

Staff has question themself where they want to go and which oportunities they have, they made a clear decission, that they keep on the server setup with minor changes.
As the playernumbers are very low and it is unknown if they rise again in strong numbers (probably not without some hard work) there need to be considered if the server should have some benefits for the few players, for example:

- Better xp gain (as it is very hard to find groups with this few players)
- Faster crafting and easier leveling up a crafter (as there are not many crafters around and ppl have to skill crafters up on their own)
- Better RP gain from RvR,- rps from guard missions, solo rvr missions etc. (as there are only few enemies around and the rp gain/progress is low)
- Adjustment of bossmob levels from dragons etc. to make it farmable with few players (As their loot and ROGs are still needed for economy and templates)
- Accountvaults as there are sill ppl without a house and it ´s harder to find ppl to transfer stuff from char to char
- Optional better gold/drop gain from mobs as it ´s harder to find groups for farming

Did I forget something? Also these changes won ´t have a big impact if playernumbers would rise again.

Also it ´s nice to have you around Aby and Genji, but it would be a good sign to read other staff members here too from time to time, to have a feeling this project is not abandoned. Where have Gnome and Trishin gone? what ´s up with Blue? What ´s up with SI?
I know you guys have a lot to do, and it ´s summer and so on, but the demise is long lasting and without some fresh heartblood this server won ´t rise again. Indeed?